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You want to make sure your body gets all the nutrients it needs to function well, then quit loading up on vitamins and start loading up on real foods. This is the new message. For me it makes commonsense. The nutrients they try to package in tablets comes from natural products. Scientists extract certain parts of it, package them and say they are better for us, but do they know, have they isolated all the subtle nutrients in an orange. Yes orange has a lot of vitamin C and my grandmother could have told you that orange is good for you when you have a cold, but what other trace elements do an orange has? The effectiveness of real food can never be replaced by an artificial concoction. The real food offers a holistic combination of all the trace elements that makes it potent and better for us.

Recent research shows that “after several vitamin studies have produced disappointing results, there’s a growing belief that food is more than just a sum of its nutrient parts. In a recent commentary for the journal Nutrition Reviews, University of Minnesota professor of epidemiology David R. Jacobs argues that nutrition researchers should focus on whole foods rather than only on single nutrients. “We argue for a need to return to food as the source of nutrition knowledge,’’ writes Dr. Jacobs with co-author Linda C. Tapsell, a nutrition researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

There you go!

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There is an article in the New York Times (Sept 26/07)alerting parents to the fact that if they choose to give their children organic breakfasts they may be missing out on vitamins found in the regular cereals.

The article proceeded to report that since the 1940’s, commercial cereal companies have been adding vitamins to their flakes, puffs and O’s in order to replace nutrients stripped away during the manufacturing process.

This is ridiculous and I think articles like this is just trying to promote those useless, additive-driven, sugar and salt laden cereals for children. What is better than pure wholesome food? We do not need manufacturers to strip wheat of its natural vitamins and minerals to make it more appealing and then add these back to the foods using all kinds of preservatives.

The natural vitamins and micro-nutrients found in pure food cannot be replaced fully by artificial means. There may be valuable trace nutrients that even the scientists do not know about but which provides us with some healthy benefits.

My advice is to separate food from vitamins. If you have to give your child a multivitamin a day, then do so but don’t try using cereal as a multivitamin table. It’s absurd.